Sometimes we wake up with a multiplicity of ideas swirling around in our heads. Today I thought about the rich and diverse debate going on in discussion groups at universities around the country. Among the issues that interest me, particularly from my own research and writing agenda include:
-the nature and purposes of 21st century higher education (for society)
-the work forces necessary to achieve the goals of the university
-how decisions involving education are made
-the role of the citizenry, students, faculty, staff in decision-making
-funding higher education
-metrics for assessment: profits, richness of educational experiences, student well-being, contributions of education to society
-curricula: STEM, humanities, social sciences, and/or a model of knowledge that sees them all as interconnected.
-impacts of the funding of higher education by the public, corporations, the military, religious institutions
-connections between universities and the communities in which they reside: public spaces, residences, businesses.
Perhaps having these conversations now is appropriate, given the crises, short and long-term, we face. If we do not address some or all of these questions now, decisions might be made for us, or decisions will occur, almost inadvertently as administrators respond issue by issue.
As a graduate student in the 1960s I remember the excitement, vitality of debate, and chaos that was occurring on college campuses. It was a time of unbridled growth in higher education (in some ways the opposite of today), emerging criticisms of the university connections with war and militarism, and growing self-reflection on race and gender in higher education. Paradoxically a full embrace of a growth-oriented economic model of higher education (that paralleled growth in the economy at large) generated discourse and debate that challenged the growth dynamics. Discussion in some classrooms or in “free universities” proceeded in a non-traditional way while much of higher education continued on a path supporting corporate globalization, the full realization of the national security state, and the achievement of the promise of “American exceptionalism.” What was exciting and important about those days in the university was the vibrancy of the debate about the dominant ways of thinking about higher education. The spreading debates engaged citizens of states, students, faculty, staff, and politicians. (Some of these reflections are described more extensively below).
As difficult as its seems today, that debate about the nature, purposes, and vision of higher education in the 21st century needs to proceed or decisions about the immediate future will be made by small bodies of decision-makers with very selective stakes in the outcomes. Task forces of faculty, students, staffs, and citizens need to begin conversations now or the future will be decided accidentally or by those with limited visions and interests.
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Reflections from Before the Pandemic
MR
Online
Higher
Education Today: Theory and Practice
In
the Beginning
I am a child of the cold war. I was born in 1940, was an adolescent in the 1950s, and devoid of political consciousness when President Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” in 1960. I was modestly inspired by the young President Kennedy’s admonition to “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” In fact I have thought a lot about that exhortation recently as I compare the enthusiasm with which young people embraced the Kennedy campaign in 1960 and the way young people today are energized by Barak Obama. While most of us did not realize then that JFK spoke for American empire, he helped mobilize young people who throughout the 1960s fought against it.
I was not just an empty vessel, ready for cooptation,
however. I read and heard about the courageous people organizing and
participating in the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch counter sit-ins, and the
freedom rides in the south. And I slowly but significantly drifted into
the cognitive orbit of the melodies and messages of Pete Seeger and the
Weavers, but the politics of social change only marginally entered course work
in high school and college. As a student of foreign policy and diplomacy
and international relations I gravitated toward the most “radical’ paradigm
reflected in curricula at the time, “the realist” perspective. This view
suggested that all nations, even our own, were driven by the pursuit of
power. Defending freedom, fighting totalitarianism, standing up to
communism, the realists said, was the discursive “cover” for the drive to power
for which all nations were driven.
I attended a graduate program in political science that was in the forefront of the new “behavioral science” revolution. We were told we were scientists in the academy and citizens when we returned home. As scientists we were engaged in the pursuit of the construction of empirical theory about human behavior. Our task was to better describe, explain, and predict — not change — political behavior. The unverifiable “laws” of human nature, embedded in the realist logic, were to be replaced by rigorously acquired data and verifiable knowledge claims.
When I came to Purdue University in 1967, assigned to teach courses
on international relations, I was troubled by the fact that neither the
realists nor the behaviorists helped me understand the escalating war in
Vietnam. I was also increasingly troubled by the assumption that it was
not my place as a professor to do anything about the war, as teacher or
citizen, presumably armed with a body of knowledge that might have value to the
debate about the war.I attended a graduate program in political science that was in the forefront of the new “behavioral science” revolution. We were told we were scientists in the academy and citizens when we returned home. As scientists we were engaged in the pursuit of the construction of empirical theory about human behavior. Our task was to better describe, explain, and predict — not change — political behavior. The unverifiable “laws” of human nature, embedded in the realist logic, were to be replaced by rigorously acquired data and verifiable knowledge claims.
I
started teaching a course with the ambiguous title “Contemporary Political
Problems,” and through it my students and I explored the writings of the day
that we thought bore upon our place in the world. These ranged from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), to the Port Huron Statement
(1995), to Camus’ The Rebel (1992), to C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite
(1959), to William Appleman Williams’ The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy (1972). Later on I organized courses around
anarchist and utopian thought. My exposure to the Marxist tradition came
later.
Almost invariably, our discussions ended up exploring what the
various theorists and activists we read thought about education. We added
to our readings in these courses essays on education by Paul Goodman (1964),
Ivan Illich (1999), Jonathan Kozol (1968), Herbert Kohl (1988), Robert Paul
Wolff (1970), and such eclectic writers as Lewis Mumford (1963). And this
was before the availability of the works of Paulo Freire in the 1970s, and
followers such as Henry Giroux (2007), Peter McLaren (2000), and other radical
educational theorists. Out of all this, I began to develop an analysis of
the political and economic contexts of higher education; a sense of the
contradictory character of education, particularly higher education; a
conception of how my education had been shaped by the cold war and U.S. empire;
how the modern university was “contested terrain,” as to ideas and behavior;
how “theory and practice” were connected; and, for me, what the obligations of the
educator were in the modern world.
The
Political Economy of Higher Education
In his
presidential address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2000,
Robert Perrucci refers to “Galileo’s crime.” He argues that while most
claim that Galileo was punished for proposing that the planets moved around the
sun, others have pointed out that he was condemned because “he chose to
communicate his findings about the earth and the sun, not in Latin, the medium
of the educated elite, but in Italian, the public vernacular, parola del popolo” (Perrucci, 2001).
This
thought, for me, constitutes a parable for the history of higher education as
we know it. In my view it is not unfair to suggest that institutions of
higher education have always been created and shaped by the interests of the
ruling classes and elites in the societies in which they exist. This
means they serve to reinforce the economic, political, ideological, and
cultural interests of those who create them, fund them, and populate them.
Robert
Paul Wolff years ago wrote a book entitled The Ideal of the University (1970). In it he identifies the historical university as
the training ground for theology, literature, and law. In each case,
sacred or secular canonical texts were studied with a microscope. Their
study was designed to reify and transmit the core knowledge claims, ethics, and
laws across generations. Wolff’s description, written forty years ago,
about a reality hundreds of years earlier might still resonate with us today.
Thus the activity of scholarship is in the first instance a
religious and literary activity, directed toward a given corpus of texts,
either divine or secular, around which a literature of commentary has
accumulated. The corpus is finite, clearly defined, growing slowly as
each stage in the progress of Western civilization deposits its masterpieces in
the Great Tradition. Though the tradition may contain pregnant,
emotionally powerful commentaries upon life and men’s affairs, the scholar’s
concern is with the textual world, not with the world about which the text
speaks. (Wolff, 5)
Wolff (1970), Berlin (1996), Smith (1974) and others add to this
discussion an analysis of how the university changed in the late nineteenth
century to serve the needs of rising industrial capitalism in Europe and North
America. The university shifted in the direction of serving new masters:
from the clerics and judges to the capitalists. Plans were instituted in
elite universities to develop “departments,” compartmentalizing knowledge so it
can be fashioned for use in research and development, human relations, making
the modern corporation more efficient, developing communications and accounting
skills, and developing good citizens. Elite universities initiated the
changes that made higher education more compatible with and an instrumentality
to modern capitalism. The model then “trickled down” to less prestigious
universities, which in the end become even more effective developers and
purveyors of knowledge for use in capitalist societies.
Wolff
quoted Clark
Kerr, the former president of the University of California system
and the target of the student movement in that state in the 1960s, who hinted
at this theme of connectedness between certain societal needs, power, and
education, and a parallelism between the era of the industrial revolution and
the quarter century after World War II.
“The American University is currently undergoing its second
great transformation. The first occurred during roughly the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, when the land grant movement and German
intellectualism were together bringing extraordinary change. The current
transformation will cover roughly the quarter century after World War II.
The university is being called upon to educate previously un-imagined numbers
of students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge
its activities with industry as never before; to adapt to and rechannel new intellectual
currents. By the end of this period, there will be a truly American
university; an institution unique in world history, an institution not looking
to other models but serving, itself, as a model for universities in other parts
of the globe.” (Wolff, 33-34)
For Kerr, the modern “multiversity,” responding to the needs of
society as reflected in federal and corporate research funding, is obliged to
produce scientists, engineers, and doctors. This university, he said, was
“a model” for higher education around the world.
During
World War II and the cold war, the modern university began to serve powerful
new masters. As Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, advocated in
1946, there was a need to maintain the coalition of forces that defeated fascism
in Europe and Japanese imperialism in Asia to stave off new threats to U.S. and
global capitalism and to forestall a return to the
grim Depression economy of the 1930s. To do that, Wilson said, we needed
to justify the need for government (particularly the defense
department)/corporate/and university collaboration, a collaboration that did so
much to secure victory during the war. He once referred to his vision as
“a permanent war economy” (Jezer, 31). As the post-war years unfolded, that
justification was created, the threat of international communism. The
military, defense-related corporations, and research institutions had a reason
to work together: to lobby for dollars, do the research, produce the
technologies, train future scientists and engineers for the cold war, and
educate the broader non-technically trained population in and out of the
university to accept the basic parameters of the cold war struggle.
Henry Giroux paraphrased President Eisenhower’s warning,
referred to above: “. . . the conditions for production of violence, the
amassing of huge profits by defense industries, and the corruption of
government officials in the interest of making war the organizing principle of
society had created a set of conditions in which the very idea of democracy, if
not the possibility of politics itself, was at stake” (Giroux, 14-15).
Giroux claims that in Eisenhower’s first draft of his famous
farewell address he refers to a “military-industrial-academic complex.”
In it Eisenhower recalls that in prior days scientists tinkered in their
laboratories with experiments that intrigued them. Now, because of huge
costs, of course, scholarship and research required federal and corporate
dollars. But, and here is the warning, “. . . the prospect of domination
of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the
power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.” Later in
the 1960s, J. William Fulbright, former senator from Arkansas, warning about
the influences of defense spending and the arms industry, wrote that “In
lending itself too much to the purposes of government, a university fails its
higher purpose” (Giroux, 14-15).
What kind of claims can be derived from these formative
statements; the variety of literatures of more recent vintage, such as those by
theorists such as Giroux; and our observations of universities, curricula, and
academic professions?
First,
higher education remains subject to, influenced by, and
financially beholden to governments and corporations. These influences
profoundly shape what professors and graduate students teach and research.
Second, as
history shows, conceptions of disciplines, fields, bodies of knowledge,
appropriate methods, fundamental truths pervasive in disciplines (rational
choice in economics and the pursuit of power in political science) and the academic organization of universities are shaped by
economic interest and political power.
Third, the
sociology of professions — professional associations, journals, peer review,
the validation of professional work, definitions of the substance of courses,
dominant paradigms governing disciplines — is largely shaped by economic and
political interest.
Fourth, in
the main, the university as an institution is, and has always been, designed to
serve the interests of the status quo, a status quo, again governed by economic
and political interest.
Discourse
and Contradiction in Higher Education
It would be a mistake to leave the impression that all that the university does is diabolical, even as it is shaped by and serves the dominant economic and political interests in society. Within the confines of what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,” researchers and educators have made enormous contributions to social advancement in scholarship and human development. However, the argument here is that the university as we should see it does serve some more centrally than others. But even this is not the whole story.
There emerged over the centuries and decades a view that this
institution, the university, should have a special place in society. It
should be, as Lasch referred to the family, “a haven in a heartless
world.” Through its seclusion, professors could reflect critically on
their society and develop knowledge that could be productively used by society
to solve human puzzles and problems. In other words, the doctrine of higher
education diametrically conflicts with the reality described above.
The Galileo case suggests he was punished for his theoretical
and communications transgressions by the academic hierarchy of his day.
More recently, scholars such as Scott Nearing were fired for opposing World War
I, and over the years hundreds more for being communists, eccentrics, radicals
of one sort or another, or for challenging accepted professional
paradigms. Of particular virulence have been periods of “red scares,” when
faculty who taught and/or engaged in activism outside some mainstream were
labeled “communists,” which by definition meant they were traitors to the
United States.
In response to the ideal of the free-thinking scholar who must
have the freedom to pursue her/his work, professional organizations and unions
embraced and defended the idea of “academic freedom.” Academic freedom
proclaimed that researchers and teachers had the right to pursue and
disseminate knowledge in their field unencumbered by political constraints and
various efforts to silence them and their work. To encourage young
scholars to embrace occupations in higher education and to encourage diversity
of views, most universities in the United States gave lip service to academic
freedom and in the main have sought to protect the principle in the face of
attacks on the university in general and controversial scholars in particular.
During periods of controversy and conflict in society at large,
universities become “contested terrain.” That is external pressures on
universities lead administrators to act in ways to stifle controversy and
dissent. The targets of that dissent and their supporters, and students
and colleagues at large, raise their voices in protest of efforts to squelch
it. Interestingly enough, the university, which on the one hand serves
outside interests, on the other hand, prizes independence from outside
interests.
Red
Scares in Higher Education
Ellen
Schrecker documents the enormous impact that the red scare of the 1940s and
1950s had on higher education in her book, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and
the Universities (1988). She
interviewed academic victims of McCarthyite attacks on faculty at prestigious
universities. They were subpoenaed to testify before state legislative or
Congressional committees about their former political affiliations and
associations. As was the requirements of the times, those ordered to
testify could not just admit to their own political activities but were
required to give witness against others who they may have known.
Some victims were former members of the Communist Party, others
were signatories to petitions supporting the Spanish loyalists during their
civil war, and still others had supported banning atomic weapons. The
most troubling element of the red scare story was the fact that university
administrations refused to defend those of their faculty attacked and in fact,
as she reports, some university officials demanded that their faculty cooperate
with the investigatory committees. Her subjects reported that they
received little or no support from administrators because officials wished to
protect their universities from funding reductions.
Since
the collapse of the cold war international system, some scholars have begun to
examine other aspects of the anti-communist hysteria as it related to the
academy. Fones-Wolf (1995) and others have addressed the multiplicity of
ways in which funding priorities, rightwing assaults, official pronouncements
from government officials, lobbying efforts by big business groups, and
shifting electoral political currents affected and shaped the content of academic programs. For example,
disciplines can be seen as reflecting dominant “paradigms” which include
assumptions about what the subject entails, what aspects of the subject deserve
study, what theories are most appropriate for understanding the subject of the
field, and what methods should be used to study subjects in the field. All
the social sciences and humanities privilege paradigms that did not challenge
ongoing U.S. cold war assumptions about the world.
In each case, dominant paradigms of the 1950s and beyond
constituted a rejection of 1930s and 1940s thinking, which was shaped by the
labor and other struggles of the Depression era. Literature shifted from
privileging proletarian novels to the “new criticism,” separating “the text”
from historical contexts. History shifted from a model of historical
change that highlighted conflict to one that emphasized
consensus-building. Sociology shifted from class struggle/stratification
models of society to “structural functional” approaches. Political
science shifted from “elitism” and institutional approaches to emphasizing “pluralism,”
in political processes. For political science, every citizen in a
“democracy” can somehow participate in political decision-making.
In other words, the military-industrial-academic complex shaped personnel
recruitment and retention and the substance of
research and teaching. Some new disciplines, such as Soviet studies, were
funded and rewarded at selected universities and the scholars trained at these
institutions then secured jobs elsewhere. Thus an anti-communist lens on
the world was propagated. Disciplines with more ready access to research
dollars — from engineering to psychology — defined their research agendas to
comport with government and corporate need.
In response to the university in the “permanent military
economy,” students in the 1960s began to demand new scholarship and
education. Opposition to the Vietnam War particularly stimulated demands
on professors to rethink the historical character and motivation of United
States foreign policy. William Appleman Williams and his students, the so-called
revisionists, articulated a view that the United States practiced imperialism
ever since it became an industrial power. Classrooms where international
relations and foreign policy were taught became “contested terrain” for
argumentation and debate between the older and more benign view of the U.S.
role in the world and the view of the U.S. as imperial power. Dependency
and world system theories gained prominence.
The contestations spread. Students demanded more diverse
and complicated analyses of race and racism in America, patriarchy and sexism
in gender relations, and working-class history. Every discipline and
every dominant paradigm was subjected to challenge. The challenges were
also reflected in radical caucuses in professional associations and even in
some of the more upright (and “uptight”) signature professional journals.
As a result there was a diminution of red scares in higher education, for a
time.
The spirit of ideological struggle in the academy diminished
after the Vietnam War and especially after Ronald Reagan became
president. Reagan brought back militant cold war policies, radically
increased military expenditures, declared Vietnam a “noble cause,” and
developed a sustained campaign to crush dissent and reduce the strength of the
labor movement. The climate on campus to some degree returned to the
1950s.
However, a whole generation of 60s-trained academics were now
tenured faculty at universities around the country. They had
institutionalized programs in African American Studies, Women’s Studies, Peace
Studies, and Middle East Studies. Critical theorists populated education
schools, American Studies programs, and other pockets of the university.
These faculty continued the debate with keepers of dominant paradigms, created
interdisciplinary programs, and developed programs shaped by key social issues
such as racism, class exploitation, gender discrimination, and war.
But by the 1990s, a new red scare was surfacing. Some
conservative academics and their constituencies talked about declining
standards brought by the new programs. Others criticized what they
regarded as an insufficiently rosy view of United States history. They
claimed that the United States was being unfairly condemned for being
complicit, for example, in a holocaust against Native Americans or because
slavery and racism were central to the history of the country. They
formed academic associations and interest groups to defend against critical
scholarship.
Then
David Horowitz came along. Overseeing a multi-million-dollar foundation
funded by rightwing groups, Horowitz launched a campaign to purify academia of
those who have records of teaching, research, and publication that he saw as
unduly critical of the United States, ruling political or economic elites, or
the global political economy. He opposes those scholar-activists who
participate in political movements or in any way connect their professional
life with their political lives. And he opposes those academics who
participate in academic programs that are interdisciplinary, problem-focused,
and not tied to traditional fields of study. He published a book in 2006,
The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America
(2006), in which he presents distorted profiles of
illustrative faculty whom he believes have violated academic standards because
of a variety of transgressions. Most of those identified either engage in
political activity and/or participate in interdisciplinary scholarly programs
that he finds offensive: Middle East Studies, Women’s Studies, African-American
Studies, American Studies, and Peace Studies.
In conjunction with the book and similar assaults on those he
disagrees with on his electronic news magazine, Horowitz has encouraged
right-wing students to challenge the legitimacy of these professors on college
campuses and has tried to get conservative student groups to get state
legislatures to endorse so-called “student bill-of-rights legislation.”
Such legislation would establish oversight by state legislatures over colleges
and universities, especially their hiring practices.
In conjunction with campaigns led by Lynn Cheney, the former
vice-president’s wife, and Senator Joe Lieberman, senator from Connecticut, an
organization called the American Council of Trustees and Alumni was
created. As Giroux summarizes it, “. . . ACTA actively supports policing
classroom knowledge, monitoring curricula, and limiting the autonomy of
teachers and students as part of its larger assault on academic freedom”
Giroux, 162).
Horowitz, ACTA, and others who attack the university have
targeted visible academics for scrutiny and persecution. Ward Churchill,
a provocative professor of Ethnic Studies, at the University of Colorado,
was fired after a university committee was created to review his scholarship
because of controversial remarks he made off campus. Norman
Finkelstein, a DePaul University political scientist who had written several
books critical of interpreters of Israeli history and foreign policy, was
denied tenure after a coordinated attack from outside his university led by
Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. Distinguished political scientists
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have been the subject of vitriol and false
charges of anti-semitism because they published a long essay and book analyzing
the “Israeli lobby.”
This latest red scare against higher education has had failures
and successes. Horowitz has had a visible presence on national cable television
and radio. He used it to attack some of the 101 dangerous
professors. However, his supporters have not been able to get any of
their legislative proposals accepted. Also, most university
administrators have defended their faculty from the crude assaults from
Horowitz and his followers. In addition, many of the 101 and others like
them have stepped up their public defenses of their scholarship and
teaching. It is unusual for any students to level attacks against
targeted professors. If anything, they defend the right of professors to
be critical analysts in their subject areas in the classroom.
But, the new red scare has reinforced and legitimized the
dominant paradigms in various academic disciples and created an environment of
intellectual caution in the academy. While the impacts are immeasurable,
younger faculty cannot help but be intimidated by the public attacks on their
senior colleagues. The system of tenure and promotion in most
institutions is vulnerable to public pressures, individual reviewer bias, and
honest disagreements among faculty about whether published work and teaching is
worthy of promotion and tenure. Therefore, just as the administrators and
faculty of the 1950s felt vulnerable to outside assault on their institutions,
those passing judgment on today’s faculty might see the necessity of caution in
hiring and retaining faculty whose perspectives are new, different, radical,
and engaged.
Intellectuals,
the Critical Organic Discourse Model, and Higher Education
The
latest red scare has rekindled debate concerning the role of higher education
and faculty as to research, teaching, and activism. Those propagating the
red scare insist that education should focus on celebrating American society,
history, and institutions. Anything less, to them, constitutes bias and a
violation of the principles of academic freedom. In addition, educators
should not engage in political activism. Being an academic and being a
citizen must remain separate.
While
ACTA and others complain about the negativity of those reflecting on United
States history, more sophisticated red scare spokespersons, including Horowitz
himself, emphasize one or another of two different approaches to the
academy. Some argue that the professorate must be “fair and balanced” in their academic work. That
is, they should in the classroom present all points of view, indicating
favoritism to none. Presumably their research and writing should strive
for this balance as well.
Parallel
to the fair and balanced position is the argument that teachers and researchers
should be
objective, that is, apolitical, and indifferent to the merits of competing sides to a conflict being studied. The objectivity standard requires that the professor abstain, in his/her public role from participation in society. It should be noted that some targets of the red scare attacks have responded by claiming they are fair and balanced and objective, and occasionally their students have defended them on these grounds as well. In fact, when Horowitz has been asked on national television if he has proof that his victims have not been fair and balanced and objective in the classroom, he has been forced to admit that he has no way of knowing since he and his researchers had not had occasion to observe the professors in question.
objective, that is, apolitical, and indifferent to the merits of competing sides to a conflict being studied. The objectivity standard requires that the professor abstain, in his/her public role from participation in society. It should be noted that some targets of the red scare attacks have responded by claiming they are fair and balanced and objective, and occasionally their students have defended them on these grounds as well. In fact, when Horowitz has been asked on national television if he has proof that his victims have not been fair and balanced and objective in the classroom, he has been forced to admit that he has no way of knowing since he and his researchers had not had occasion to observe the professors in question.
While
being fair, balanced, and objective are worthy goals, they stand in
contradiction to the history of the university alluded to throughout this
paper. What I call the critical and organic discourse
model is a more appropriate standard of scholarship, teaching, and
engagement for these critical times. It has several dimensions: speaking
truth to power; critically reflecting on all institutions and processes in
society, privileging unpopular ideas, and applying those ideas in social
settings where they may be helpful to bring about change.
The last point, inspired by Gramsci’s idea of the “organic
intellectual” and the discussion by Jacoby and others about the role of the
“public intellectual,” suggest that knowledge in the end comes from and should
be used in support of those in society who have been disenfranchised
politically, economically, and culturally. As Gramsci put it, “The mode
of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is
an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active
participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent
persuader,’ and not just a simple orator. . .” (Gramsci, 10). Gramsci’s
“organic intellectual” is the intellectual who is connected to various social
groups or movements and acts in concert with and stimulates the activities of
such groups. The organic intellectual in class society is linked to the
project for historical change of the working class. Historically the
university has not served their needs, and those who embrace this model of
teaching, research, and engagement should stand with the disenfranchised, such
as the working class.
In sum,
the most important elements of the critical and organic discourse model involve
giving voice to the voiceless and engaging in
education, research, and activity to pursue peace, social, and
economic justice.
Conclusion
We have seen that the university historically has reflected and
represented whatever ruling classes were prevalent at a given point in
time. We have also seen that the university is a site of contestation
defined by a public ideology of academic freedom that justifies critical
thought, pedagogy, and practice. In this latter regard, Giroux points
out, the university is an uncommon institution in modern life where full
democratic participation in dialogue and critical reflection can take
place. Being fair, balanced, and objective is not enough to meet the
needs of building a democratic space. The university (its educators) must
use this democratic space to engage students in reflection about the pursuit of
peace in this violent world, and the striving for social and economic justice
and against racism, sexism, and economic inequality. (Some peace
researchers have defended their practice by using a medical education
metaphor. Medical education is based on the study of creating health out
of illness. Fields like Peace Studies are based on the creation of a
healthy body politic out of violence, discrimination, and inequality.)
Each
approach to teaching in the university is evaluated on the basis of different
“validation principles,” that is, the standards of judgment of success or
failure. For the crude celebration-of-America approach, teaching and
writing is judged on the basis of how positive it has been about the American
experience. For the fairness and balance and objectivity approaches, validation
comes from colleagues who judge the quotients of different points of view
and/or the distance of the research and teaching from a point of view.
For the critical and organic discourse model, validation comes from the extent
to which the ideas developed resonate with and reflect the voiceless and the extent to which the total product of the
professors activities — teaching, research, and activism — have facilitated
peace and justice or not. This is indeed a very high standard but, given
the world we live in, the only realistic standard that should be applied both
to the university and those of us who work in it.
References
Aronowitz,
Stanley, The
Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True
Higher Education, Beacon, 2001.
Berlin,
James. A., Rhetorics,
Poetics, and Cultures, Refiguring College English Studies,
National Council of Teachers of Education, 1996.
Fones-Wolf,
Elizabeth, Selling
Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60,
University of Illinois, 1995.
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Peter, Che
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Harry
Targ is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science of
Purdue University. This article is the text of his public lecture,
presented at the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science, University of
Tennessee at Chattanooga, 1 April 2008.
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